The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-09-10
A SIBERIAN TRIP.
st. James Gazette.

NJ. JuHlcs- 1HZcttt
 A lively French writer-I think it is Dumas 5eye in that amusing and de- lightfully inaccurate book of his, From Paris to Astrachan'-compares his sensations on entering Russia to those of prisoner ushered into an immense prison, over which brooded as head jailer the gigantic figure of the car. To me the main sensation was of negative description; it was a feeling of absence of jubilee. In St, Petersburg and Moscow, indeed, the painfully familiar word still haunted one in the newspapers and i'll the com mon talk of men; but beyond Mini Novgorod the world was ill the state of ignorance which characterized that very primitive church recorded in the Acts of the Apostles; they knew not so much as whether there be a jubilee or not. This was refreshing: refresh- ing also, after the heat and dust of railway travelling, where the cool breezes which blow up the Volga and the Kama as the steamer passes up and down these magnificent winding rivers. Indeed, trip down the Volga or the Kama, or even the Dmeper, may be confidently recommended 10 those weary of the hackneyed Rhine, the well-known Danube, or the oft-seen Hudson.
 The scenery, though it cannot be called grand, is picturesque through out. The occasional villages and townships, with the green-rooted churches, with their golden domes and crosses, which dominate the landscape; the immense broad reaches of water, down which brightly painted barges and huge rafts of wood slowly float the endless hofizon, with its miles of forest and marsh, and its long stretches of cultivation all these form pict- ure which is unique in Europe, and which has strange charm and tas- cination of its own. The travelling, also-if you speak Russian-is in the highest degree pleasant. In the course of four or five days on river people get thrown together, and there is no more genial and considerate fellow traveller than the Russian. Of steam- CTS there is an immense variety. No fewer than 700 hundred ply on the Volga; and the passenger boats which travel from Mimi to Astrachan, built on the American system, are floating palaces of comfort. Tho9e who go only as far as Kazan, and thence up the Kama to Perm, are not of such excellence thongh the cuisine is good and there is really nothing much to complain of. A captious critic might deplore the absence of baths, and might consider one basin, with a limited supply of water, sufficient washing accommodation for the whole number of first-c class passengers, but the philosophic traveller may console himself by reflecting on the cleansing properties of the Russian bath which he will get at the close of his journey.
 We were not inconveniently over crowded. A Siberian mine-owner and his family, cultured and sympathetic professor from Jaroslay, travelling as special correspondent of the Moskor- skf Vgedomostt, two or three students, and few business men belonging to the Ural region constituted the party, and an unfortunate Frenchman, unable to speak word of Russian, who, by some mistake, had become possessed of a German passport, constituted, with his sapprehensions ofarrest and Siberia, the comic element which is rarely wanting in mixed ship-load of pas sengers.
 There are four passenger lines to Perm from Mini; the Lubimoff, the Kamenskeech, 0he two besD, the Kurbatoff, which also operates on the Siberian rivers, and the Gregorietf. The competition between these lines has reduced the rates to the lowest possible figure; for the noble science of "poolingn as practiced by American railroad men appears not to have been developed as yet in eastern Russia. The third-class traveller on the kur- batoff line can get carried distaDce of a thousand miles, and housed for four days, for the small sum ot two rubles, or about three and sixpence He has, of course, to feed himself, but th-S lC WOui0 navy tO oO oh. :" h~A> else; so the mujik lies on his back in g perfect paradise of idleness, drinks tea and eats pies. till he feels the req rapture of repletion and repose. know of no part ot the civilized world where one can get carried at cheaper rate. In rather less than four day' after calling at about twelve stations en route, Perm is reached. and thert is the Ural railway to Ekaterinburg and Tiumen begins. That raiiwa, system is thus separated from thu main railway system of Russia by distance of about thousand miles
 and it is characteristic of the neglect